It’s afternoon recess, and a game of tag is underway at RiverTree School in a northwest suburb of Minneapolis. As two students race across the playground, the chased yells a command over his shoulder to his pursuer, “I love thee not, therefore pursue me not!”

In a separate corner of the yard on another day, Robin Hood’s merry men are engaged in a heated stick-sword fight with an enemy just outside Sherwood Forest, which is cleverly disguised as a regular old stand of oak trees on this day.

By a generous act of diplomacy, the merry men spare his life and issue an invitation to join their band, which he readily accepts.

After reading a chapter in Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin during read-aloud time, one student goes home determined to find out if cat’s hair really does make a good paintbrush. The school’s co-founder Marybeth Nelson confirms that it does, according to her own children’s similar experiment and her dear cat’s unwavering conviction to never let it happen again.

“It’s a sign of a good book if the children go outside and start acting it out in play,” Marybeth says. “We just give them instruction on how to play with sticks without hurting each other.”

Spending time in great stories creates appreciation and hunger for things outside our world, expanding it. Stories make our world bigger.

This is readily seen in the play of young children, but the same progression is happening in older students as well. They’re inspired toward the care of women and children when reading about passenger rescue attempts during the sinking of the Titanic. The dystopian societies presented in Huxley’s Brave New World and Rand’s Anthem help students appreciate independence and free thought in a new way altogether.

Throughout their Ambleside education, students encounter ideas presented through story in each living book. As they put themselves into the stories, they’re engaging with the ideas held within — and those ideas stay with them.

“We all think in stories. It’s how we interact with each other,” Nelson explains. “Stories are how we connect with people, and so I think that stories are also how we connect with ideas. They are the backbone of what we do.”

Stories Shape Ideas.

Of all the memorable characters in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Collins is one of the most distinct because of the extremity of his social awkwardness.

At her school one afternoon, Nelson overheard a classroom discussing this clergyman’s clumsy compliment of the boiled potatoes at the Bennet dinner table. Eventually, the teacher called on a student whom she had noticed being very quiet throughout.

This student shared, in an unexpected moment of vulnerability, that she had never thought of Mr. Collins as being awkward because she could relate to him. “I don’t know what to talk about when I’m at a dinner party or when I’m with new people,” she confessed. “I know I often say the wrong thing or maybe I just make a little comment about the food because I know it’s something safe to talk about. And so he didn’t strike me as so awkward. I could understand where he was coming from.”

Nelson said you could tell from her voice that there was a larger question being presented: “Am I also awkward, then?” In the tension of the moment, she waited to see how the other students would respond.

But that student’s vulnerability made everybody else enter into the same kind of honesty, admitting they hadn’t considered that they often do the same. The teacher was able to lead the discussion into how they could respond in a similar situation, and how they could show graciousness to a friend who maybe doesn’t know the right thing to do in that kind of setting.

“If I made a lesson plan about how to be a good dinner guest and how to make good conversation, that would be really flat,” says Marybeth. “But that story provides the scaffolding to have these interactions that end up being much more powerful.”

Stories Shape Relationships.

Nelson recalls a particular fifth-grade student who was a very determined individual. When this student landed in Nelson’s office after being escorted off the playground by her teacher, Nelson asked the girl what had happened, and the girl shared her experience.

Knowing the girl needed to calm down in order to be able to think about things in a new way, Nelson turned the conversation to story, asking questions about the book she knew the student was reading in her fifth-grade classroom.

“Who is your favorite sister in Little Women?” Marybeth asked the fifth grader.

“Mrs. Nelson,” the student answered immediately, “I identify with Jo so much.”

After talking further, Nelson asked, “So that’s interesting because Jo also struggled with her temper. Did she ever regret it?” And they talked about when Amy burned Jo’s novel and how angry Jo was. Then after Jo went through the process of almost losing Amy, the two girls reconciled.

The student confessed, “Some days I think that everybody just wants me to be like Beth, but I’m not like Beth.”

“You don’t need to be like Beth,” Marybeth replied. “Wouldn’t our world be kind of dull if everyone was Beth?” They talked about the other characters in the book, concluding that there’s a reason why there are so many different personalities in the fifth-grade class.

Stories Shape Character.

We probably read Shakespeare in the first place for his stories, afterward for his characters. . .  To become intimate with Shakespeare in this way is a great enrichment of mind and instruction of conscience. Then, by degrees, as we go on reading this world-teacher, lines of insight and beauty take possession of us, and unconsciously mold our judgments of men and things and of the great issues of life.

 

― Charlotte M. Mason

Marybeth Nelson

Co-Founder and Director of Curriculum

RiverTree School